State-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp on Monday said it had released a second batch of offshore blocks for bidding in the 2012 tender round, two months after it offered blocks that overlap with acreage in the South China Sea that Vietnam had previously awarded to operators.
CNOOC said on its website that the second round comprises 26 blocks, with total area spanning 73,754 sq km.
One block is in the Bohai Bay while three blocks lie in the East China Sea. Eighteen blocks are in the eastern part of the South China Sea, mostly in the Pearl River Mouth Basin, while the remaining four blocks are in the western part of the South China Sea in the Qiongdongnan Basin. Most of the blocks are over 1,000 sq km in size.
CNOOC's map of the acreage places most of the blocks offshore Guangdong province and Hainan island in southern China, although three blocks are further north off the coast of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province.
The company has offered three deepwater blocks with water depth ranging from 700 meters to 3,000 m and where no prior drilling has been done.
In a rare move, it has also offered five "single structure" blocks, each covering 5 sq km to 60 sq km. They are in the Pearl River Mouth Basin in water depths of up to 200 m.
"Compared with the shallower blocks and those in the single structure areas in the Pearl River Mouth Basin, there could be more potential in the deepwater blocks because they are more frontier," said Huang Xinhua, upstream analyst at IHS in Singapore.
Five of the blocks -- one in the East China Sea and the rest conventional shallow water blocks in the Pearl River Mouth Basin -- were offered in previous bid rounds.
The company said data rooms for the acreage are open in Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Zhanjiang and will be available until November 30 this year.
CNOOC offered nine oil and gas blocks for foreign cooperation in the South China Sea on June 23 in an area south of Hainan in waters that Vietnam considers part of its exclusive economic zone, sparking protests from Hanoi and state company PetroVietnam, and raising tensions over existing boundary disputes in the South China Sea.
Given the political risks involved, analysts had said these blocks were unlikely to garner any bids from foreign companies, although CNOOC chairman Wang Yilin said last week at the company's interim results briefing that a few companies had shown interest.
CNOOC is ramping up offshore exploration to help boost production from the Bohai Bay, where many fields are mature and in decline. It spent $1.07 billion on exploration capital expenditure in the first half of this year, up 73.5% year on year.
In April, CNOOC announced that the Penglai 9-1 discovery made in 2010 in the eastern Bohai Bay was the largest oil find made in recent years and evaluation of the reserves is ongoing.
